Yori: a hybrid approach to robotic cuisine

There seem to be two general approaches to Kitchen automation. There is “let’s do a robot that can work in human cuisine because everyone has human cuisine”, which seems to be a good idea, except that you must then build your robot to operate in human environments – which is super hard. At the other end of the spectrum, there is “let’s make an automated system dedicated because automation is easier than robotics”, which seems to be a good idea, except that you must then be willing to accept compromises in Recipes and texture and taste because the preparation of food in an automated way simply does not give the same result, as who has already tried to make a way to develop knife skills can tell you .

THE Robotics and Mechanisms Lab (Romela) at the University of California in Los Angelesled by Dennis Honghas worked on a compromise approach that exploits both automation adapted to robots and the type of human skills that make things taste good. Called Project Yori, which means “Yummy Operations Robot Initiative” and is also the Korean word for “cooking”, the system combines a robot optimized environment with a pair of weapons that can operate kitchen tools a bit like a human.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ssgzcbyqc8

“Instead of trying to imitate how humans cook,” say the researchers, “we have addressed the problem thinking about how the kitchen would be accomplished if a robot cooked. Thus, the Yori system does not use cooking methods, tools or typical utensils that are developed for humans. In addition to a variety of automated cooking systems, the tools used by Yori are modified to operate with a tool change system, which mainly eliminates the problem of entering something like a knife enough to exercise Precisely and repeatedly a substantial amount of force through it, and this also helps to keep things structured and accessible.

In terms of cooking methods, the system benefits from technology when and where it works better than conventional human cooking techniques. For example, in order to say if the ingredients are fresh or to determine when the food is cooked ideally, Yori “uses unique chemical sensors”, which, I suppose, are the robot equivalents of a nose and taste buds and would undoubtedly make a more empirical evaluation than an unnecessary recipe metric as “seasonal season”.

The advantage of a system like this is versatility. In theory, these added robotic capacities mean that it is not as limited by the recipes that you could pile up in a system built around automation. At the same time, it is some not practical – or at least more practical than a robot designed to interact with slightly modified human cuisine. And it is in fact designed to be practical (ISH), in the sense that it is developed under a partnership with Woowa brothersThe company which directs the first food delivery service in South Korea. It is obviously always a work in progress – you can see a human hand sneak from time to time. But the approach seems interesting, and I hope Romela continues to progress, because I am hungry.